At 7:55 AM -0700 10/28/06, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> In short, it's a request that I wouldn't put any effort into
> implementing unless there was overwhelming demand for it.
There's a much more basic problem -- you'd have to parse the
MIME/HTML bodyparts of each of the messages being submitted, convert
them to some sort of canonical form, and then wrap them in a larger
MIME/HTML message. It's hard enough to understand the formatting
used by a single MUA, it's quite another to have to be able to
understand the formatting used by all MUAs.
You might be able to get say 70-80% of the way there with a single
MUA, but I don't think you could hope to achieve even 50% success
with a wide variety of MUAs.
I would not be at all surprised if it's basically impossible to
perform this task, at least to any kind of moderately adequate level.
This is the equivalent of being able to write a program that can
understand all spoken/written human languages, convert them to a
single canonical form, and then put them all together into a single
volume.
I don't know if you've ever seen Babelfish or other automated
translation tools, but let's just say that, even on their best day,
they are only barely adequate for the simplest of translations
between the most common of languages. You wouldn't want to try to
run the United Nations using such tools.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>
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